Home sweet home isn't all that sweet
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By Ellen Fox
Special to the Tribune
October 1, 2004
Looking like something you might find in Martha Stewart's prison cell,
Sally-Ann Rowland's pretty, beaded
cross-stitched samplers, a handful of which are on display with John Neff's
panels at Western Exhibitions gallery through Oct. 30, lend a dose of
acid to a fondly domestic pursuit.
Instead of "Home Sweet Home" or other such saccharine homilies,
Rowland's framed embroidery sports terms of resignation, like "Oh
well" or "I don't understand," or even expletives.
Death Angel Mushroom (Amanita virosa), 2003 [Fuck Everybody]
cotton embroidery thread and beads on Aida cloth
24 ½ x 20 ½ inches (framed)
Don't look for cherubs or butterflies cavorting about her handiwork either:
Poisonous plants and mushrooms are the subject matter, alluding to the
historical association between females and poisoning, Rowland explains.
"I liked it almost as a way where sort of heavily repressed female
anger could come out," Rowland said, on the phone from her job as
a registrar at a gallery in New York. "Because even for something
like the cross-stitch, each stitch is a little X, which could be seen
as a miniature negation, so the whole picture is made up of these millions
of little negations."
Nightshade (Atropa belladonna), 2003 [I Can’t Understand]
cotton embroidery thread and beads on Aida cloth
24 ½ x 20 ½ inches (framed)
Four years ago, after winning a scholarship, the Australia-native abandoned a doctoral program in political philosophy at the University of Adelaide and moved to New York. After receiving her MFA from Columbia University, she became the Australian artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.
Working at her P.S. 1 studio, or out of her nearby apartment, Rowland
spent two to three months creating each sampler. ("It was actually
really peaceful, I found. I listened to a lot of NPR and lots of conversations
on the phone.") She drew from pictures of poisonous plants but, surprisingly,
she didn't preplan her designs on paper.
Fly Agaric Mushroom (Amanita muscaria), 2003 [Oh Well]
cotton embroidery thread and beads on Aida cloth
24 ½ x 20 ½ inches (framed)
"If I just sort of made it up as I went along, then it was just full
of little decisions and making it became quite an active process, rather
than something that I just had to sit there and patiently reproduce,"
Rowland said.
Whether she sees herself as part of the renewed interest in knitting and
do-it-yourself crafts among young women these days, or as part of the
fashion for ironic kitsch (like those frou-frou Urban Outfitters vases
that read "bitter" or "rich"), Rowland is conscientious
about the quality of her work.
"I didn't just want it to be ugly and angry or anything like that,"
she said. "I wanted them to be just sort of slightly troubling and
I wanted them to be beautiful and seductive and attractive. I wanted to
make them as pretty as I could."
So where does this "heavily repressed female anger" come from?
"I had a really nice childhood and I don't have any problems with
anything as far as I know, but I don't know," said Rowland, 30.As
the middle of three daughters raised by doctors (both parents are pathologists),
her so-called "girly" upbringing included music lessons, cooking
projects and, yes, cross-stitch kits, but it was "also very free,"
she added.
"I did a lot of feminist studies as well during my university years.
And often these things are maybe a bit of a process of working out what
I think, or feelings about situations that I'm in at the moment, pressures
that I might have," Rowland said. "I think all women have that.
We all live with expectations and more expectations than the average person,
I suppose."
Poison Ivy (Rhus toxicodendron), 2003 [Just Kidding]
cotton embroidery thread and beads on Aida cloth
20 ½ x 24 ½ inches (framed)
This summer, Rowland got engaged ("and I'm so happy about it!"), but the prospect of wedded bliss hasn't exactly softened her outlook. Right now she's pondering future projects like beaded, glittery sculptures of mold and fungus, or, perhaps, a negative picture book, "something that could look like a child's picture book but wouldn't be appropriate for children," she said.
Her current show at ZieherSmith
gallery in New York features a collection of not-quite-Hallmark-approved
greeting cards.
"Like, one of the cards is a house, but then I added a meteorite
and various beads to show the house in the middle of nowhere that was
hit by a meteorite. And then I have another one that's a view over mountaintops
which I stitched a nuclear bomb over the top of."
There's even a "Get Well" card with a sleeping dog on it, "but
then I made a puddle of blood coming out of the dog's mouth, flies in
it and stuff, so it was dying."
Really, Sally-Ann, you sound like such a nice girl.
"I think it's one of the reasons why I can feel so--I don't know--like,
so happy or well adjusted, because I've got somewhere else to put these
things that I'm not really sure about," said Rowland.
"And then in the rest of my day I can carry on and not be too negative
or something," she laughed.
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Sally-Ann Rowland
Where: Through Oct. 30
Where: Western Exhibitions, 1648 W. Kinzie, Suite 2
Price: Free; 312-307-4685
Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune
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